The winning of $400,000 through the Prime Minister’s Science Prize will enable Magritek to bring on a complementary researcher with a different skill set to its development team.
“There is never a finite, limited amount of R&D that you can do,” says Dr Andrew Coy, Magritek’s chief executive, and leader of the commercialisation company that’s taken Victoria University’s magnetic resonance research to the world in small scale packages.
“We want to keep growing, and to do that we’ve got to keep investing in the innovation,” he says.
That side of the prize money will be used to create a PhD scholarship for a student to work on magnetic resonance, which uses magnetic fields and radio waves and measures the interaction with an atom’s nucleus, measuring signature frequencies. (See sticK story here).
Coy says the prize is a recognition of a fantastic team and of a lot of work carried out over a long time.
“We’re proud of what we’ve achieved academically, and that we’ve commercialised that and are generating millions of dollars in export income,” he says. “We want to continue that.”
As well as the $400k for research, there’s another $100,000 to be split between the research team members – which they can decide to spend how they may.
Meanwhile, Coy’s going to “take the team out and do something special. This is a real honour, we’re really chuffed about it.”
